report user report abuse flag something?

Has anyone created a “flag this”, “report user” “report abuse” kind of button thing for buddypress that works and is currently usable?

I have seen things for admins to mark things as spam, but I think we all need a button for other users to click and report – anything from an activity stream post, to a private message, or a user, (media and or blog posts would be a bonus)

but I doubt it works with any current wp / bp combo, and have no idea if it was even supposed to work in this manner. Since it is not in the official wp plugin depository I am not even going to mess with it.

Certainly someone can put together some code to mix a “like button” kind of code with a “send info to admin” kind of thing.

I think most of us need or will need something like this. I am trying to learn php right now, wish I could help with this!

I don’t know of a plugin that can do this but if one was to be built, it would need the following parts:

The button which does the flagging: The most stylish way for the button to work would be through AJAX. Like a toggle button. If the reporting user clicks by mistake then they can undo the flag by clicking again. Would the reporting user be able to submit text along with the flag click?

A list which outputs all of the flagged users: This should be accessible to admin users only

Notifications: Would you want an admin user to receive an email each time a user is flagged?

I doubt a custom database table would be needed for something like this. Recording the flags can be done via user meta. I was thinking of building something like this a while ago but haven’t had the time recently.

Good suggestions Henry. I would love to see something like this put together, and would be willing to donate a few bucks to the development if it was released in gpl or whatever into the wordpress plugin directory.

Ultimately it would be nice if the button had a backend options setting, where you could check off “superadmin get an email?
admins get an email?
specific email addy or list of addys that should be notified?

This kind of plugin would give community admins some crowdsourced help!

I would imagine advanced versions of this could include a popup box that had a few pre-canned “reasons” for the flag user, and form space for adding a non-canned note to it, that could be included in any emails.. and if the url that the button was clicked on could be included it may help to sort out if it was a picture post, something that appeared on the activity stream, words in a profile – etc.

Love to see this button available and be easily added to certain places around the buddypress site – I am sure some people would prefer a “report this” button to show up next to each and every activity / status update, and on each profile page, sub page, group, etc..

I also imagine some people would prefer an option for the button to simply be an icon, like the font awesome warning icon.. something that could be styled in different colors.. and when hover over it, it’s title tag says”report content to admins” or something..

I really think this would help a lot of the BP communities that are running!

This sort of functionality is something that’s definitely required for BP – there’s no way an admin can go round reading everything on a busy site, abuse monitoring has to be crowdsourced to the members.

Interestingly it covers just about everything – from members, private messages & their senders, statuses, activity comments, topics, forums, groups, posts, pages, blog comments, and probably a whole bunch of other things. I have a hunch they are hard-coded though.

IMHO if the UI could be cleaned up, images replaced with icon fonts, and somewhat improved control over link text implemented, this plugin would be pretty much there and would cover just about all aspects of WP, BP and (with some extra coding) probably even bbPress.

Unfortunately I’m pants when it comes to PHP so can’t help with this task 🙁

@naijaping – thanks for taking the time to look into / test that other abuse plugin and providing some feedback. Sounds like some good ideas working in there! (and good luck with your bp theme, if it’s not based on bootstrap, I’d love to test it out! (the bootstrap based bp themes all fail when used in combination with rtmedia’s bp-media in my experience)

@localiseorg – thank you for mentioning this one! It does look like that plugin was made for the exact kind of thing that we are talking about here! Looks like it is old outdated code though, since it’s in the wp depository, I assume someone could fork it and fix it up to work with current wp / bp.. or at least look at the code to see if there is anything in there that would help a new plugin do more.

Now I am scratching my head as to why I did not stumble across that one in all by google searches, wordpress.org searches, and buddypress.org searches. Hmmm. The name is very similar to another bp plugin I used ages ago that set up moderation for all new members, not allowing them to post certain things until they were manually approved – that one was awesome for a while, but then started to break with newer bp versions.

Anyhow, it looks like this kind of thing has been attempted, but there is nothing that is compatible with current versions (completely it seems).

and yeah “there’s no way an admin can go round reading everything on a busy site” – is driving me crazy now that my buddypress site has started to get busy on a daily basis.

With WangGuard the users can report users activity and users from his profile.

What do you need, I can implement it in the next release or maybe in an add-on.

Now there is an add-on for blacklisted words, now don’t work in activity (comments, groups, message, etc) but in a future release, I will add it. With blacklisted words, the admin add some blacklisted words, as Viagra, cialis, etc. when a user use that words in a post, the admin is noticed by email with a link to the post. Too, that words can not be used in usernames, emails, blog names, etc.. Ex. If a user use the username thebestviagra, he will be blocked.

I will add this feature to the activity, so if a user use that words, the admins will be noticed.

Decide how many reports something needs before an automatic response is triggered. Eg. if 5 people have flagged a comment as bad, person who made that comment should get a customised message and the message should optionally be forwarded to an admin.

The message I’ve set up in BP Moderation plugin looks like this:

%AUTHORNAME%,

Several users reported your content as inappropriate:
%CONTENTURL%.

A community moderator has been notified and will review the content. If it is found to be in violation of our site terms of use, your account will be removed.

%SITENAME%

Front-end UI:

Make HTML as consistent as possible, but compatible with the UI found for the specific type of content.

Ensure there is a specific class on all flag/report links, eg. class=”abuse-button”

Ensure there is a content type specific class on each flag link, eg. class=”abuse-type-comment”

Ensure there is a state specific class on all links, eg: class=”not-flagged” or class=”is-flagged” as applicable.

Use AJAX when user flags/unflags something to avoid page refresh.

Management Interface:

There should perhaps be two management interfaces, one for site admins in the WP backend, and one for forum/group mods in the front-end.

In the backend, see BP Moderation plugin for an example.

In the front-end, it would be nice if say a group admin/moderator would get messages about problem users in their group and be able to deal with it themselves (via front-end UI, I don’t want normal users of my site going in to WP backend). This would reduce workload of WP site admins.

Spam integration:

I assume this is something native to WP but it might be from a plugin, not sure. Anyway, in admin area when you go in to Comments or Topics, etc., and hover over content items you get a spam link in the links that appear:

It would be nice if when the auto-response message is triggered (as mentioned earlier – for example after 5 people report something) it could be marked as spam. When marked as spam, content is hidden from the front-end and moved to a ‘spam’ folder on the backend. This would mean if several people report something it is temporarily hidden while an admin looks in to it – if the admin thinks it’s ok they can un-spam it, otherwise they can delete it.

I have no idea which content types / reply types support this spam thing. It would also be worth checking with whoever implemented the spam thing to see what their future plans are?

Other Notes:

If the new plugin could provide hooks so that other plugins such as WangGuard could hook in to it, that would be ideal. For example, if WangGuard sees a blacklisted word in a comment it could automatically flag it or something like that.

It would be useful if there was a record kept of how many times a user’s content has been flagged enough times to trigger auto-responses. This would enable admins to spot repeat-offenders who are regularly annoying other end-users and factor that in to any subsequent decision making (eg. should I ban that user?).

It would be nice if there was a way to auto-suspend a member account if lots of their content is getting reported/flagged. This ties in with the count thing mentioned above. So if they’ve spammed groups and forums with spammy adverts, etc., and as a result other members have reported those things several times, the offending user would be auto-suspended if they have more than say 3 items moved to spam at any given time.

The simplest thing would be a basic report this button that could appear next to all content displayed with a buddypress install. As mentioned above sending an email to the superadmin with the referring url would be nice.. added functionality has been discussed up above that would make this even better.

I’d like to mention here, although it probably deserves it’s own thread, it would be a good idea to give users and option to ‘block user’ or auto-ignore / bozo other users.. this way people who may not get their account deleted for not violating rules after a report – could be blocked from having their pms show up, or activity show to the other user who wanted to block them.

Combining the “report this” with an option to further “block all content (pms, activity stream messages, group posts, etc) – from appearing while user A is logged in.. that would make buddypress much more professional and user friendly.

Thanks for the info about these block user plugin options! I have my fingers crossed that the one in the wordpress.org repository will work as advertised.. but it says it is plugin v1.beta – and says compatible up to 3.6 (or something like that)

Have you have a chance to test these to see if they work as intended? Any idea if installing and running them for a little bit and then decided to deactivate leaves behind problems with the database or anything?

It’s clunky but seems to work. I have no idea what mess it might create in the database.

For any community or social networking platform to survive, it’s essential that content moderation can be divested to and distributed amongst the end-users. IMHO this sort of functionality should be bundled with BuddyPress.

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